The Noise of Infinite Longing (26 page)

The new girl became Amaury’s wife, a nice girl, mother wrote me. Dot was her name, from New Hampshire. They moved there. New Hampshire? Amaury in Concord? I could not imagine it. The marriage lasted four years. Amaury got work loading and unloading trucks, making a living, but the marriage didn’t survive.The surprise to me was that it had lasted that long. And afterward he went back to San Juan.

He couldn’t sit still. Just as his leg jerked back and forth and his hands pointed and circled when he spoke, his mind couldn’t settle down. He found only the dead past in San Juan. His friends were scattered, married, playing in clubs here and there.

He was a man out of places to run to.

For him there was only one road—San Juan to NewYork.

Chapter Ten

The Visionary

W

atching Angeles pluck flowers in Sara’s garden, trimming their stems, filling a glass bowl with water and placing the cuttings in it, arranging them with a gentle move of her fingers, I had the strange sensation that I was watching my mother. I thought of a picture I had seen on my mother’s piano, in her house in Edgewood, mother and Angeles posing at a fashion show. Angeles was only fif- teen then, but there was nothing of the child left in her face. She had her hair pulled up in a French twist. Her eyes were outlined in black, her eyelashes curled, longer than mother’s. They looked like sisters. When my mother looked at Angeles, she saw herself. When she looked at me, she saw my father. I had his small face, small eyes, small mouth, and when I was a child that made me an adorable figurine, my light hair falling in curls around a doll-like face. I was cute, mother liked to say, pinching my nose. Angeles has my eyes, my mouth, mother then would add, and I believed this brought them closer, gave them a secret bond, a deeper connection, and as we grew older, they became like mirror images in my mind. Angeles interpreted mother for me, as if she had absorbed her, deciphering her, explaining her, telling me things mother had told her that I had

not known.

Now, so many years later, Angeles was graying, grayer than mother had ever been, and her hair, which once fell down her shoul-

ders, was cut short, cut by herself, and she had gained some weight, soft flesh showing under her T-shirt and around the waist of her jeans.

But she was still beautiful, I thought.

She placed the vase in the middle of the kitchen table, two hands under the base, careful to spill no water. The roses, grown along a wall on the side of the garden in the backyard, their petals a pinkish white, imperfect, with tiny brown spots, were just beginning to open.

It was early, the house was still quiet. Sara, in her nightshirt and shorts, was making coffee. Her hair was uncombed, straggling to her collarbones. It was darker than I remembered, had grown darker with age, and she did nothing to it, let it fall down to her shoulders. She had a thin face, not oval or round, but narrow along the cheeks, coming to a period in the chin. She looked neither like mother nor father, but had the light appearance and the spriglike posture of Tití Angela Luisa when she was younger. It was a look that gave her more height. Her voice, too, was different from ours, higher, like the cheeping of birds. She was so Texan, had been born four years before our parents’ divorce, and had moved with mother to Texas when she was just nine years old. She had inhaled Texas, married a high school boyfriend from Abilene, had given birth to two daughters who inher- ited Rick’s all-Texan bones and frame. Sara even spoke the language, with that extended Texas drawl, as if she had heard it in the womb. She was the only one of us who had no trace of a Spanish accent.

Pushing her hair behind her ears, a habit she had, she wiped the immaculate kitchen counter for the third time, pulled off the plastic top on the Maxwell House can, and spooned the coffee into the filter. She moved automatically, the steps memorized, done day after day.

Her face had pillow lines this morning, her cheeks seemed more hollow.

She’s exhausted, I thought, all these people disrupting her orderly life. This death!

Why don’t you stay a few more days? Angeles said, looking at me. She was already smoking, her index finger tapping the cigarette. Her mouth is a bit crooked, I thought, like mother’s. I turned to her. Her glasses reflected the sunlight. I couldn’t see her eyes, the severity in them, but I knew the lids were swollen from sleep and from the beer of the night before.

She wasn’t asking me, really, she was making a statement.

I picked up my coffee, lit a cigarette I didn’t want. This was not going to be easy.

Oh, I don’t know. I’ve got to get back. Have things to do.

Sara piped in:You can stay as long as you want. Olga is staying, but Carmen and Amaury are leaving tomorrow. There’s plenty of room. She had only three bedrooms, hers and Rick’s, and each of her girls had her own, but they were doubling up to make room for me, Angeles, and Amaury, while Olga and Carmen stayed with their hus- bands and children in a hotel nearby.

Sara would never say, Why doesn’t everyone go so I can have my house back? Even if she wanted to say that.

No, I said. I think I should get back... . The landlady thinks I’m coming back tomorrow . . . the plants need watering.... I’ve got to meet an editor....

Angeles shrugged. But I don’t see you but every few years, she said. Think about it.... It’d give us time to talk.

She put out her cigarette and shuffled back to her room. Sara said, How do you find her?

Better than the last time I saw her, I said, recalling the time, two years before, when she and mother had come to see me in NewYork. It was September 1992, and mother had come from Texas alone, just

to see me, and Angeles had decided at the last minute to fly in from Honduras. We were in the living room, mother and I, waiting for her. I jumped up when I heard the doorbell. I opened the door slowly, as if unwrapping a gift, and Angeles was right there—unbe- lievable!—wearing her thick glasses, her T-shirt and loose pants.We looked at each other for a second or two, unable to move, the years running through my mind, the five years I hadn’t seen her.

The September before that, in 1991, I had received one of her rare letters. “So much has happened since the last time we really, really saw each other,” she wrote, “something like fifteen years, that it would be like a novel when we catch up again.” They were build- ing a house on a hill in Tegucigalpa, she said, “our magnum opus, after Jose, of course.”

It did seem like fifteen years had passed since we’d seen each other. The last time I had seen her was at Christmas in Abilene in 1987, when the six of us were last all together. Our paths had hardly crossed since 1979, when she had gone to Nicaragua.While she lived in Managua for eight years, I had moved from Charlotte to Philadel- phia, and from Philadelphia I had moved, in 1986, halfway around the world, to Manila. My mother hadn’t thought it senseless for Angeles to move to Nicaragua. Mother was thrilled, in fact; Angeles was joining a revolution she understood and supported.

But my decision to quit my job in Philadelphia to go to a country in Southeast Asia did startle her. She knew about Marcos and Cory Aquino and had been intrigued like much of the world with that story, but what would I do there, without a job? I will write, I told her, my usual answer.

A year later, Christmas 1987, for mother, for the holidays, I flew in from Manila and Angeles came from Central America.

That Christmas, the house held all of us, all six of us, and Leon

and Leon Jr. And father. He had flown in from San Juan. It was odd to have both my parents in the same room, in the same house, and more awkward to see father and Leon together. Leon had never been a father to me or to Angeles and Amaury. He was a man my mother married, a good man, someone she loved, but he had no connection to us other than the piece of paper she signed when she married him. He had tried to make us his family, but we were too old when he came into mother’s life. We were father’s children, not his. Even to the younger girls, to Carmen, Sara, and Olga, who grew up in his presence, he was a stand-in, a substitute, not their father. But one gets used to nearly everything in a family, the strained arrangements, the silent compromises, and the fights. By now, father and Leon had their routine down pat, the roles they played, always polite to each another, keeping to light conversation, respectful, even friendly, roles that only men can play.

On Christmas Day, mother was in the kitchen all morning, set- ting up the platters of food and the table. She had a place for each of us. But Angeles, Amaury, and I took our plates to the living room, and opened one bottle of beer after another. It was then, after gifts were handed out and the family pictures were taken, when Angeles, who had too much to drink, said something, did something, I don’t know what, and mother and father, together, came to me. We’re worried about Angeles, one of them said, probably mother. She looks so frail, she smokes too much, she drinks too much. I crossed my arms, nodding, I didn’t know if I was angry or sad looking at the two of them, mother in her nice dress, father in his suit, helpless.

What do you expect, you did this to her, I said. I blurted it, not knowing what I was saying. But I knew that her drinking, her bouts with depression, her stubborn will to defy convention and do what she wished even when it hurt her, all of that had something to do with them. Their divorce? My father’s beatings? Had they not seen

from the beginning, from the day she was born, that she was more vulnerable than the rest of us.The light that was her intelligence saw too clearly and too much.

Did you really say that? Sara muttered, her eyes popping. That was unfair.

Yes, it was, but I had been furious at them for years. It just came out.

What did mother say? Sara asked. Cried, no? She always blamed herself.

I said, Mother dissolved in tears and father got up from the sofa, pushing himself up like an old man and left the room, that’s what happened. He was leaving the next morning, I remembered. You know, Sara, I never saw him again.

Between that Christmas in 1987 and the time of our meeting in NewYork in 1992, Angeles had left Nicaragua and returned to Hon- duras, and I had lived nearly three years in Manila, briefly in Tokyo, and had returned to NewYork.

The years had left marks. How could they not, but I still had no trouble remembering her as she looked at fifteen, at twenty-five. Now her hair had swaths of gray in it. Her face, the skin of her face, had acquired the softness, the looseness that comes with age, and she felt smaller and bonier, almost fragile, when I threw my arms around her, holding her head to my shoulder.

Hadn’t she just flown in from Honduras? Sara asked.

Yes, she was tired, a lengthy trip, a long stop in Miami, immigra- tion, customs, and you know how nervous she gets when she travels. But no sooner was she in the door than she was reaching for a beer and going through her handbag for her cigarettes. Mother embraced her once, twice, those crushing, frenetic embraces she had for us, tears on the border of her eyelashes. It had been a long time for her, too, since she had last seen Angeles.

Rummaging through her bag, Angeles found her cigarettes, her lighter.

You look the same, she said to me, lying. I touched my hair. We laughed. Well, you don’t have gray hair, she said, patting her own head. I look ancient, don’t I?

I was so riveted by her I had barely noticed Amaury standing at the door, dragging her suitcase. He had picked her up at the airport, but I’d nearly forgotten he was coming and, turning to him, gave him a quick kiss. He looks happy, I thought, always happy when he’s with her. Bottles of Corona came out, glasses were set on the table, ashtrays, smoke soon hovered in wisps and then in clouds over the room, and mother sat on the sofa, taking polite sips of her beer, sitting straight up in her dress and her heels, filling the air with her exclamations, her eyes like gaslights, flickering, lightened by the sight of her three oldest children there, together.

But Angeles, Sara interrupted my story, Angeles, how was she really?

Nervous, I said, but joking with Amaury, you know how they are, until we had drunk all the beer, and Amaury left with mother—she was going to stay with him and his wife in their house in Queens. After they left, Angeles and I took a walk down the street, got some- thing to eat—of course she doesn’t eat, just picks at her food—and we got a six-pack for her, some wine for me, and some flowers at the corner grocer.

Did she talk then about her years in Nicaragua? Sara asked.

I knew little about her years in Managua, mostly secondhand sto- ries. I had not gone to see her there, not once in eight years, never saw where she lived and how she lived.Angeles had gone to Managua when the Sandinistas took power, in 1979. She became a senior gov- ernment official, director of housing—finding and building homes

for hundreds of thousands of displaced people, dirt-poor families, orphans, widows, bomb victims—in a devastated country, in a coun- try at war, where there was no food in the stores, no toilet paper, no lightbulbs, or streets with names, nothing but disaster . . . and Flor de Caña. Never out of rum, never out of Flor de Caña.

She threw herself at her work with alacrity and a fervor she had shown for little else in her life. As an architect with a mind for math- ematics and strategy, she had the qualifications for a job that, in a poor country at war, required more zeal than talent, more patience and political savvy than diplomas on a wall. And for eight years, without a break, she fought without funds, without materials, and, increasingly, without much hope. She worked night and day, hung- over and sober, sick to her stomach, she lived off coffee and Flor de Caña and the idea—the idea!—that the people, el pueblo, could rise against history, against centuries of exploitation and colonialism. For a time, she was one of them, down to the uniform, going through hours of training to fire an AK-47—“They kept telling us, ‘Annihi- late the enemy, annihilate the enemy,’ and I kept telling them, ‘But I don’t want to kill anyone.’” She worked around the politics, the intrigues going on in the junta, the backstabbing and casual betrayals, and the corruption that inevitably came to touch almost everything and everyone in power. She had such will, such an obsession. What she couldn’t do in Puerto Rico to help bring about independence— she had talked about this since she was young, since the days when she read the works of the independence leader Albizu Campo, since her miserable days in Pennsylvania and then in Florida, since then, she had dreamed of a free Puerto Rico, not this island that had been, in her view, bought and sold, its people fed false dreams, its identity truncated, a United States passport in one hand and Latin blood in its veins. She couldn’t fight for Puerto Rico; she would then fight for